sk1pper

I wholeheartedly agree it's easier to write clearer OO code after spending time writing in Clojure.

But I think another drawback of cljs is readability. It's super cool that everything is data and data structures, but it makes it harder to eyeball code, just takes longer to parse and understand how these data transformations actually map to side effects on the page.

IMHO well written OO code is easier to understand and reason about.

> I’m not even going to consider a system valid without managing IO in some way. So yes, all flavors of Lisp are off the table as well.

We're talking functional in the context of JavaScript, I think ClojureScript deserves more of an explanation on why it doesn't even qualify. That is, if you're trying to hold to the "neutral as possible" thing in the beginning.

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good.

Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion.

As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It's gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn't reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I've NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.

Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it's worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability.

Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I've tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course.

Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol

Right? I felt like it was so heavy-handed. There were so many small references in there to A New Hope, seems like they were trying to cater to viewers who were pretty familiar with the original movies already anyway. Ending with the shot of Vader watching them fly off or something similar would have been better imo.

Edit: to be clear I'm operating off of the assumption that they did that so it was impossible to miss the fact that A New Hope picks up directly after the end of this movie

That's a super interesting perspective.

After programming for many years I found Clojure pretty mind-bending, so definitely props for being able to pick it up.

Clojure 100% made me a better programmer. I got pretty in to it for a while but ended up punting and going back to React, and then later Vue, because I really started to feel like the "code is data" thing makes the code really hard to understand at a glance.

Example: in Reagent (this applies to all of the react-wrappers I think), displaying a table is as simple as returning a vector in a certain format; thus my code is a simple function mapping what I have (probably a vector of maps) to what Reagent wants.

Simple. Mathematical. But here's the thing - my brain doesn't work in functions that transform data. Instead, I'm trying to think in HTML, because that's the target result anyway. So I have to kind of parse the code mentally and mentally compile it to what it will "really" look like. Maybe I didn't work with it long enough to get used to it or something, though.

JSX, Vue, Angular really help with that mental compilation step and allow you to see something a lot closer to what's going to be actually output, and therefore make it a lot easier to reason about what the browser's gonna do.

Anyway, I was curious, have you continued working with Clojure very much?

Don't skip K&R. Probably read both. They're both pretty short.

A really, really good one is Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. But, it's pretty expensive.

Hah, and to add to the irony, the servers that host all of this stuff run an OS designed by a bunch of hippies.

> a more stable language like Go, Rust, Clojure, or Elixir

Uhhh..? A more trendy language? Are we really saying that Elixir is more stable than Python?